Course Layout

Each course in the UCLP is divided into segments for teaching, these segments are as follows: Overview, Demonstration and Practical. Each section is described below.

Overview

This is a student visible piece of documentation covering the concepts of the subject. This is the core material an instructor will be teaching in a class.

It should avoid giving instructions or examples and concentrate on showing things in terms. For example if you were going to demonstrate ls in the Demonstration section you would say ls /tmp, but in the overview section you would say ls [directory] which explains the form without demonstrating it.

Simple example:

The ls command (short for list) takes a directory argument and prints the contents of the directory to the standard out.

Demonstration

This is simply the ideas put to action by the teacher. It should go from begining to end of the concept, every step and should explain what is being done. Most of this documentation is teacher only and teachers are free to do something different if they wish.

Simple Example:

1. Run `ls /tmp` in a command line to show a typical list.
2. Run ls alone to show listing of current directory
3. Run `ls -l /tmp`

Practical

These are student challenges. They could be group activities, or student self-driven things. They should use all the concepts explained and shouldn't simply give command instructions like the demonstration did.

Simple Example:

List the contents of the '/etc' directory, you should get a great number of file and directory name printed to the screen.

Other Resources

Resources are any images, slides, documents, scripts or other external components which are used when teaching that are not included within the class documentation (like an image embedded in a portion of course documentation).

We want to maintain the source documents as much as possible to help with drafting, translation and correction procedures. Documents in publish formats won't be rejected out right, but sometimes the document may be encouraged to be brought back into a source format.